Lots of discussions on Twitter yesterday. They apparently use "40 servers" to run the site. Whoever managed to register yesterday also found out that session information was not consistent across those servers.

My joke this morning was something along the lines of "I am still surprised Wheedle needed 40 servers to serve 503 and 404 responses."

The site was up and down a few times. I managed to register to secure my user name, to find out that going through pages would show me logged in as "freitasm", not logged in at all, or logged in with someone else's name and information being shown.

Another article says they have outsourced development to an Indian-based company. This is a shame, with so many talented developers in New Zealand that could probably do a much better job in development, deployment and management. They probably cut costs by not doing proper unit/system/integration/regresion/deployment testing.

Many have tried and failed to compete in the market. Reality is that it's a winner takes all type of market, and Trade Me won years ago.

These types of marketplaces work best where there is the biggest possible number of buyers and sellers, and especially in NZ there isn't room for two players. Even with an amazing product and no fees, It would likely take years for them to become a real threat to Trade Me, and they would probably go broke in the process.

It's a pity though that trade me being almost a monopoly can do what they like with fees and there's not a real avenue to go elsewhere. But without enough dissatisfaction to go elsewhere there's no drive to stand up a competing site.